[dpdk-dev] [PATCH v2 4/6] net/representor: Implement port representor PMD

[Mohammad Abdul Awal]

On 08/12/2017 15:02, Remy Horton wrote:
>
> On 20/11/2017 07:46, Ferruh Yigit wrote:
> [..]
>> Why we need this PMD?
>> It looks like this has been used only for parameter parsing.
>>
>> Can it be possible to rte_representor_broker_init() will allocate 
>> ethdevs and
>> fill brokers with this information?
>
> Possible, but not sure it gains much in practice. It would require 
> workarounds to avoid pulling in driver code dependencies (e.g. 
> drivers/bus/vdev/rte_bus_vdev.h).

I think it possible to create the representor without pulling in driver 
codes. We probably can avoid using the rte_eth_vdev_allocate by calling 
the rte_eth_dev_allocate() directly.

Right now, the port representor register API looks like

int
rte_representor_port_register(struct rte_representor_broker *broker,
	uint32_t vport_id, struct rte_eth_dev *ethdev);

So, we probably can have that API (and make it public) as below.

int
rte_representor_port_register(const char *devargs);

We can parse the devargs to get all the parameters, create the ethdev 
using rte_eth_dev_allocate(), fill all the private data, pci_device, 
pci_driver etc. and register to the broker.

This way we can avoid having a separate PMD for port representor. This 
comes with a limitation/benefit that user do need need to pass the vdev 
info as EAL argument.

Regards,
Awal.